Here at It’s Lit it could be misconstrued that we are just Ivory Tower Literary Elites
with great hair, but the truth is … we are that, but we’re nerds too.
In the past few decades literature has expanded to not only mean the “novel”, but “graphic
novels” as well.
Today we are gonna break down how the graphic novel went from the comic book store to the
classroom.
Narrative art that tells stories has existed in some form since before civilization.
From cave paintings, to Egyptian hieroglyphics, to English serialized engravings.
And then we got COMICS!!
But the first big precursor to the graphic novel is thought to be Histoire de M. Vieux
Bois, drawn by Swiss artist and writer Rodolphe Töpffer in 1828.
Topffer used sequential imagery accompanied by text to tell the story of the titular Monsieur
Vieux Bois’s comic misadventures.
By 1841, unauthorized English translations of Topffer’s work had made their way to
the United States under the title “The Adventures of Obadiah Old Buck”.
Topffer, in the note to Mr Jabot wrote: “This little book is mixed in nature.
It is made up of a series of pictures [...] each one of which is accompanied by a line or two
of text.
The pictures without the words would only have a very obscure meaning, while the text
without the pictures signifies nothing at all.
The whole taken together is a kind of novel.”
….a…
GRAPHIC one
While mostly forgotten to modern audiences now, comics theorist Scott McCloud has called
Topffer the “father of the modern comic,” "cartooning and panel borders" along with
"the first interdependent combination of words and pictures seen in Europe"
Broadly speaking, a graphic novel is a collection of related comic strips that form a story
and are all published together as one book.
Back in the day what really separated comics from graphic novels was the higher quality
format of the book itself.
Better paper and being bound rather than stapled.
Surrealist painter German Max Ernst is credited with creating the proto-graphic novel.
In what was called the “Collage novel” Ernst would take images from other publications
and link them together with a narrative.
American Cartoonist, Milt Gross, published the pantomime tale He Done Her Wrong: The
Great American Novel and Not a Word in It — No Music, Too, in 1930 a “wordless novel”
that many consider another precursor to the graphic novel.
While not super popular it was impactful in the industry and was a huge influence on Osamu
Tezuka aka “the God of Manga” so like super niche.
These “wordless novels” were part of the German Expressionist movement of the early
20th century that were killed off in its nation of origin following the rise of Nazi censorship
in Germany.
However, it’s influence already gave birth to the artistic idea that would become the
“graphic novel.”
Now, you might be asking, “Princess, why not use the word “comic” or “comic book”
instead of “graphic novel?
It sounds like the same thing to me.
And--well--you’re not necessarily wrong; the term “graphic novel” is a fairly nebulous
one that artists, writers, critics, and fans have debated over the last few decades, but
we’ll get into that momentarily.
The term was originally coined in 1964 comic fanzine called Capa-Alpha, by Richard Kyle
but it didn’t take off as a popularized term until Will Eisner wrote A Contract with
God and Other Tenement Stories.
Sara J. Van Ness it was shared that:
When he first proposed the book to a New York publisher, Eisner recalls, “A little voice
inside me said, ‘Hey stupid, don’t tell him it’s a comic or he’ll hang up on you.’
So I said, “It’s a graphic novel.”
Eisner’s intuitive hesitation in labeling his work as a comic book suggests that he
was conscious of some negative implications that the comic book label carried.”
This collection of four stand-alone stories was something Eisner intended for “adults”
and wanted to be published in bookstores.
On the trade paperback of the title it said “graphic novel.
Making it the “first” of that mainstream label.
Contract was not the first graphic novel; many cite Jack Katz’s The First Kingdom,
which came out a few years before Contract, but what it did was elevate the term “graphic
novel” and comics as a long-form but contained storytelling device into the mainstream.
This was because Eisner worked to get it stocked in actual bookstores, validating it’s literary
value in the eyes of adult readers.
Following Contract we had titles like Sabre by Don McGregor and artist Paul Gulacy, which
takes place in the year 2020 where “Earth has succumbed to global famine, energy crises,
a plague based on a leaked American-government bioweapon” … huh…
But this is when we began to see the “prestige” division between “super serious” graphic
novels and comics.
Titles like Batman: Year One, Sandman, and The ‘Nam all serve to elevate the way readers
saw the medium.
Sandman is especially notable because as Joe Sutliff Sanders, a specialist in children's
media at the University of Cambridge, explains, “Sandman did not create the market for ongoing
graphic-novel series, did not even exactly drive it, but it did demonstrate to readers,
vendors, distributors, publishers, and writers that the future of comics lay not in monthly
serials but in bound collections.”
Look, as a nerd who loves comics, I don’t view graphic novels as inherently “superior,”
but anyone whose read Fables or Saga can tell you how a good long comic book run can nourish
the soul.
Yes, it is cool when one artist team creates a powerful stand alone story, but just because
it’s long doesn’t mean it’s good.
Which is just solid advice in general.
The major moment for graphic novels came in 1992 when I was born—and when Art Spiegelman’s
Maus became the first (and is still the only) graphic novel to win a Pulitzer.
Noted for using postmodernism expression by representing Jews as mice and Germans as cats,
the story depicts Spiegelman interviewing his father about his experiences as a Polish
Jew and Holocaust survivor.
Professor of German and Jewish Studies.
PhD, University of Virginia, Erin McGlothlin explains that:
“Within the field of Holocaust Studies, Maus is considered a key literary text by
the scholarship on testimony and trauma [...] In the cultural sphere of comics, on the other
hand, it is celebrated chiefly on account of its format, narrative, and graphic innovation
and its inventive approach to subject matter previously deemed unsuitable for the comics
medium.”
Maus is now taught in schools along with titles like Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, which
depicts her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic
Revolution.
Persepolis has been subsequently praised as a postcolonial text.
As Matthew P. McAllister and Stephanie Orme, wrote in “Cinema’s DIscovery of the Graphic
Novel: Mainstream and Independent Adaptation” for Cambridge Press:
“Instead of depicting Iranian women as universally oppressed and as in need of Western liberation,
Persepolis offers a more complete, nuanced view of Iranian women’s lives--as actively
resisting what they consider “oppressive” on their own terms.”
Through this we began to see the memoir graphic novel really emerge as a powerful storytelling
device for coming of age stories.
Craig Thompson explores his upbringing in an Evangelical Christian family and eventually
leaving Christianity in Blankets.
2006’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, details
her childhood struggles with gender identity and childhood abuse.
It was later turned into a musical that ended up taking home the Tony Award for Best Musical.
Justin Hall explains: “Fun Home was an important moment for queer graphic novels, both because
of its reception by the mainstream literary, academic, and cultural establishments and
because of how it helped push the comics industry to pay more attention to LGBTQ material.”
These stories created the foundation for many younger cartoonists and illustrators to tell
stories using this longer comic book form.
Especially now, with independent comic publications outside of the big two (DC/Marvel), places
like First Second Books and others have really allowed stories to shine.
Queer creators like Noelle Stevenson known for Lumberjanes and Nimona and Tillie Walden
(Spinning) have used the format to tell engaging stories that highlight that comics are not
and have never solely been a format for cis-white hetero dudes.
Jen Wang, writer of Stargazing and The Prince and the Dressmaker and works by Raina Telgemeier
have entered schools as well, which gives students new avenues to explore literature
made for them.
Reducing graphic novels and comics in general to an inferior artform because it’s primary
audience isn’t always adults is just baseless snobbery.
Storytelling doesn’t belong to any one format and what makes a book literary isn’t just
that there are words on a page—it is what stories are being told and how it speaks to
the human experience.
For some of us it’s Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman instead of …(checks high brow list)
Infinite Jest.
So for certain authors who think Graphic Novels aren’t books … well you are wrong.
Kathryn Strong Hansen writes “In Defense of Graphic Novels”:
“Many teachers have shown how graphic novels can help energize students whose interests
are hard to capture, can aid low-level and nonnative English-speaking readers through
the twinning of words with images, and can challenge higher-level readers to expand their
analytical skills to include consideration of visual elements.”
The only people who are still dismissing Graphic Novels are frankly out of touch and maybe
the issue is your own limited idea of what literature is, not that Superman is in it.